Luke 17:1-10 Disciplines of Discipleship - Forgiveness Sermon preached March 10, 2013 Opening After 17 years of marriage, a man

dumped his wife for a younger woman. The downtown luxury apartment was in his name and he wanted to remain there with his new love so he asked the wife to move out and then he would buy her another place. The wife agreed to this, but asked that she be given 3 days on her own there, to pack up her things. While he was gone, the first day she lovingly put her personal belongings into boxes and crates and suitcases. On the second day, she had the movers come and collect her things. On the third day, she sat down for the last time at their candlelit dining table, soft music playing in the background, and feasted on a pound of shrimp and a bottle of Chardonnay. When she had finished, she went into each room and deposited some of the resulting shrimp shells into the hollow of the curtain rods. She then cleaned up the kitchen and left. The husband came back, with his new girl, and all was bliss for the first few days. Then it started; slowly but surely. Clueless, the man could not explain why the place smelled so bad. They tried everything; cleaned & mopped and aired the place out. Vents were checked for dead rodents, carpets were steam cleaned, air fresheners were hung everywhere. Exterminators were brought in, the carpets were replaced, and on it went. Finally, they could take it no more and decided to move. The moving company arrived and did a very professional packing job, taking everything to their new home...including the curtain rods. Revenge can be delicious - but I have a better way than that to deal with people who have wronged us and the harm they inflict on us. Its more effective. Longer-lasting. And recommended by the Lord Jesus himself. Passage - watch yourselves! Alright, were studying a passage where Jesus is teaching about sin and how we can avoid it - not because the Lord is a moral scold, but for our good as his followers - and were going to focus down on his teaching about forgiveness. What to do, when weve been wronged. And interestingly enough, Jesus begins with a warning - saying that when we are 1

wronged, Watch yourselves. Now thats a little strange - when weve been wronged, shouldnt we be watching out for the person who has harmed us? Im the victim here, why do I have to watch myself? Well, Jesus here is telling us that when were abused, rejected, harmed, thats when we especially need stop, and practice some selfexamination. Why? Because when were harmed, we face a second potential source of pain - from unforgiveness and its harmful effects. Our Lord is trying to save us from that. So stay with me for a few minutes while we consider what happens to us when we withhold forgiveness. Effects of unforgiveness - Adverse Possession Have you heard of the legal concept of adverse possession? It works like this. Lets say your backyard backs up to a big farm. And youd like to put in a swimming pool but you dont have the room in your yard. So you knock down the fence separating your property from the farm, and bring in the backhoe and dig the hole and put in the pool on your neighbors property, with a nice big slide for the children. And you go out there just about every day and enjoy that pool - you invite the neighbors over and have pool parties - well, did you know that if the owner of the farm doesnt object to your public and flagrant taking of his property, that over time it will become legally yours? Called the doctrine of adverse possession. Use someone elses property, take it over and after a while, if no objection, it legally becomes yours. When we hold onto the hurt and pain of what someone has done to us, we are granting them adverse possession of our mind and heart. Because by keeping the hurt alive, we allow the other person and their wrongdoing to move into our hearts and minds and settle down and find a home there. We grant them space in our hearts and minds and if they are there long enough it can be really hard to evict them. Heres a test - is there someone who wronged you who keeps popping up in your mind on a regular basis - daily, or maybe five times a week? And when they do, you relive the hurt, you feel the anger again, and you are transported back in time right to that hurt? If so, then that person has taken adverse possession in your mind and heart And you know what? Youre thinking about the other person all the time - and they likely have forgotten all about you. Youre the one trapped, not them. You are giving them a continuing reality in your life and allowing them to shape your life long after whats happened. 2

Objection - fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Shouldnt we remember - shouldnt we keep the memory alive so the person doesnt do the same thing again? It gets complicated here - this does not mean we passively allow the same person to abuse us over and over again - but it does mean that we do not hold onto a specific wrong and allow it to occupy rent-free space in our minds and hearts. Let me give you an example. A man in one of the churches I served had a financial advisor who made some disastrous mistakes and lost most of the mans retirement savings. Really made life difficult for him and his wife. Pinched them. And the reduction in their standard of living was a constant reminder of the financial planners incompetence. But one day the man realized that five years had gone by and he was still angry and bitter and it was slowly poisoning him and sucking all the joy out of life. And he decided, he had to forgive, he had to let it go. Now he wouldnt go back to that financial planner again...but he did evict the guy from living rent-free in his heart and mind. Effects of unforgiveness - freezes you in time Lets drill down deeper - if we hold onto the pain and hurt of a wrong, its like we get stuck in the past and relive it over and over again. There's a movie called "Nobody's Fool," The main character is a man named Donald Sullivan played by Paul Newman. Everybody calls him Sully. He's about sixty years old, and spent his whole life in the same town. When his parents died, he inherited their house. He never moved in. Instead he left it alone. Because it was the house where his father beat him as a child. So he has left it alone, and every day he drives by to watch it slowly fall apart. One day he takes one of his friends, a builder, through that broken-down house The builder says, "Sully, you could have saved this place. You could have fixed it up a little bit, rented it out. You could have sold it and put the money in your own pocket. Instead you stick it to your old man. What's it been - - thirty, thirty-five years? You still keeping score? Well, here's the good news: you won." Meanwhile the house is falling down. And Sully relived the memories every time he drove by. Isnt it amazing how clearly we can remember the wrongs done to us? Its because emotion creates powerful memories. Just like a familiar smell - your mothers apple pie 3

baking in the oven - can transport you back in time when you were six years old - so can the memory of a hurt - and we can get stuck there and never really leave. Effects of unforgiveness - the hurt comes to define you. And to drill down some more - unforgiveness can cause you to become defined by the wrong done to you. Years ago I worked with a woman who was stuck like this. She had been with the same guy for years and finally they got engaged and the wedding date was drawing close, but then her fianc broke off the engagement. Of course she was devastated. But she never stopped being devastated, she never moved on. And she became Mary-the-woman-whowent-out-with-the-same-guy-for-years-and-years-and-we-were-going-to-get-married-butthen-he-broke-it-off-and-Im-hurt-angry-and-bitter-and-Im-never-going-to-forgive-him! You become...I was the one who was wounded...victimized...abused..devastated. And you were. But you are not defined by the wrong done to you. You are better than that. Do you really want that other person to continue to control you by their wrong defining your identity? Instead, lets take a page from Brennan Manning. Who wrote that we should identify ourselves this way - I am the one whom Jesus loves. And with the love of Jesus, I am far, far more, far far better, than the wrong done to me. How to be free from the pain of being wronged So lets dig into what the Lord says we need to do here. And the idea, is that we evict the person and the hurt from our heart and mind by forgiving them. Through the following steps the Lord teaches in our passage. First, identify with the wrong doer Now, this can be really, really hard, but bear with me. Jesus says, If your brother sins against you... Doesnt say, the man who used to be your brother and maybe can be again if he repents. Hes still your brother and like it or not, is still a member of the human race, hes still a neighbor whom we are commanded to love. The challenge here is that when we are wronged we focus on the dissimilarities between us and the other person. They become one-dimensional. If they lied to you - theyre a liar! If they cheated you, theyre a crook. We naturally exaggerate their faults and downplay any good that may be in them. Miroslav Volf wrote that forgiveness flounders because (I) exclude the enemy from the 4

community of humans and I exclude myself from the community of sinners.1 Well, the first step towards forgiveness is to re-admit the other person to the human race, and then realize that you and they are fellow humans - and as they have sinned, so have you. Maybe not to the same degree or anywhere near the same degree, but down deep, were all broken and hurting and self-centered. Weve all used people for our own purposes. And we all, at some point, have needed someone else to forgive us. Second, pay the inward debt of the wrongdoer The Greek word Luke uses for forgive is used in economic transactions - its secular meaning is to forgive a debt - and repeatedly the New Testament takes this word out of the economic world and uses it to describe forgiveness. Thats why the Lords Prayer says, Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And it makes a lot of sense. Because when we are wronged there is always an internal emotional debt - you sense they owe you and the currency for payback is pain - they must suffer - we feel they owe us suffering - so we go after them to make them pay the debt by hurting them. Hurting them directly by yelling and screaming, ruining them professionally, withdrawing friendship. Or we use indirect ways to make them pay by destroying their reputation through gossip and slander in the guise of warning people about them. Or maybe you just are quiet about it, inside you root for them to suffer - to fail, to have something blow up in their face big-time. And - and - if the do pay and suffer, lets admit it, we do feel better - and the sense that they owe us starts to recede - but the downside is, there is no reconciliation, the relationship is not restored - and you end up gloating over the pain of another person. So whats the alternative? Debts have to be paid, thats their nature. Like they say, if you feel like no one cares that youre alive, miss a mortgage payment. If someone owes you a thousand bucks, either they pay it, someone pays it for them, or you end up paying it. The debt doesnt just disappear. So what do we do here? We pay the debt for the wrong done to us. How you do this? When you want to hurt them, you dont - you want to run them down, slice them to pieces, run down their reputation, scream at them, but you dont - and it hurts 5

inside - you literally feel it - you have an opportunity to get them back but you choose not to take it- and it knots you up and causes grief at a missed opportunity. Or if you see them prosper and go on with life like nothing happened - and you see this and you say this isnt fair and you want them to suffer - but instead you pray for them - that hurts too - you will suffer. Why does it hurt -because its costly - you are paying the debt. But the blessing to us is, that sooner or later - later if it was a major hurt - you will find that anger starts to go down and you become free - because you are not putting fuel on the fire of your anger. And the memory of the hurt will fade and over time you will be free. Think this is impossible? Its not. This is why Jesus says forgive seven times in a day We have a choice here. Were going to pay in one of two ways when were hurt. We can pay the price in terms of allowing them to become a permanent, rent-free tenant in your mind which means long-term suffering - or you can suffer short-term pain by paying the price of forgiveness yourself. And then and only then do we evict the person and hurt from our mind and heart How to get the resources to do it I cant leave it here, and just say, ok, get out there and do it. Its hard, but try harder! The disciples reacted to what Jesus said by saying, thats impossible - we cant forgive like this - and they ask him to increase their faith - saying you havent given us enough faith to do this - and he says, yes I have. And what the Lord means is, if you understand at all what Jesus has done for you, you have in that understanding the resources, the stuff, to forgive uses illustration - taken from the ancient practice of debt servitude - indentured servants you have a debt there was no bankruptcy - you could either go to debtors prison or work for the person to whom you owed the debt. Jesus is saying to the disciples - you are debtors to God, and what if he made you pay for everything wrong youve done - you are forgetting you are servants who have been forgiven an enormous debt - and you need to extend the same grace to others. Because Jesus Christ paid our debts - hung on the cross and died for them - and his last words on the cross were, it is finished - better translation is I paid it - for you and for me. 6

If we are having a problem forgiving - look at Jesus and the beauty and power of what he did for you and me - suffering - took it into himself and felt immense pain - and all you have to do is know who you are and you will have all the power you need Conclusion I took a chance issuing you all projectiles to hold during the sermon. But now you get to use them. If you have someone you need to forgive but youre holding onto the hurt, maybe now is the time to be free. And I want to say a particular word to this congregation - I think many of you need to forgive your last pastor - youve been holding on to things that happened but its holding you back, holding this church back. But whatever youre holding onto, I invite you to come forward now and deposit your stone at the foot of the cross and ask Jesus to help you forgive, so you can be free. Endnotes 1. http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6215.Miroslav_Volf?auto_login_attempted=true